The present invention relates to systems, computer program products and computer methods for providing performance bookmarks that capture the state of business performance for advanced monitoring and analysis of business metrics.
A software “dashboard” is a tool that is used when managing a company's business performance by presenting role-based, content sensitive visibility of important business metrics in real time. Dashboard information can thus be utilized for monitoring and analyzing events in support of taking actions to improve and optimize a corresponding business. Examples of such metrics are the average response time of a supplier, the percentage of products failing quality control, the status of a particular order, the state of an insurance claim, the revenue stream of a retail product, the sales performance index for a particular geography, etc. Business metrics of particular business relevance are often called key performance indicators (KPIs).
Dashboards typically present a “live” view of the current state of the monitored events, e.g., by querying KPIs and then rendering the KPI data values through dashboard components such as gauges, tables and other visual metaphors. A dashboard is typically specific to a particular role within a business. Thus, the monitored events, and the visual display of those monitored events, may be configured in a manner appropriate to its corresponding role. For example, a vice president of insurance claims may determine a desired layout of a dashboard page, the collection of dashboard components to be used and the specific KPIs to be viewed in the components. A sales executive may have an entirely different dashboard layout, which considers a different collection of dashboard components and corresponding KPIs compared to the dashboard of the exemplary vice president of insurance claims. Regardless of the particular business role, dashboard layout or particular KPIs, as the data values of the KPIs change, the dashboard is immediately updated so as to provide a real time or near real time view of the state of the monitored events.
Typical dashboard applications address point in time issues by providing a specific dashboard component that shows the value of one or more KPIs along a time dimension. However, the time display of a given dashboard component does not capture the complete context of the entire dashboard, but rather reflects historical values for a single KPI.